WORLD ECONOMIC JOURNAL
WILL THE « GLOBAL SOUTH » REVOLUTIONISE EDUCATION ?
Traditionally , high-level education has been associated with teacher excellence , characterised by years of experience and a low student-to-teacher ratio .
By Kwame Yamgnane
Kwame Yamgnane is a co-founder of Qwasar , a nextgeneration software engineering school based in California . He previously cofounded Ecole 42 in Paris , one of the most acclaimed innovative computer programming schools of our time .
I n a country like France , which consistently produces Nobel laureates , Turing Award winners and Fields medalists , there are approximately 900,000 teachers for around 16 million students — a ratio of 1 to 17.7 — with an average teacher age of 38 years , according to official sources 1 . In the Western education model , it takes two decades to produce an " average teacher ," and a student-to-teacher ratio of 1 to 15 is considered necessary 2 .
MATHEMATICAL CERTAINTY
Now consider Nigeria , with its 220 million inhabitants , including 110 million individuals under 19 requiring education . By Western standards , Nigeria would need 15 million teachers . But how can those teachers be trained ? First , the country should train an initial generation of one million teachers dedicated to educating the next generation . Given that it takes about 20 years to train a generation , it would require 40 years to staff Nigeria ’ s education system completely . Add to this the cost of building enough schools and universities , and remember that Nigeria ' s population doubles every 50 years — it is projected to reach 450 million by 2070 . This means the previous figure could easily double , requiring the training of a third generation of teachers , which would take another 20 years ( totaling 60 years ) before the education system is fully prepared . Achieving this goal would also require hundreds of billions of dollars in investment .
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